20 word description: OpenCarPrice.com lets consumers peek into critical sales data that previously has only been available to car dealers.

CEO's 100 word description: Suppose that you are trying to buy a new BMW 335i, wouldn't it be great if you could ask to see the details of all recent sales records for BMW 335i? You won't get it from your car dealer - but you can get it at http://opencarprice.com/auto/BMW_335!

Identical cars often sell for prices that vary by hundreds, or even thousands of dollars. Car dealers can get away with that largely because consumers do not know exactly how much a new car is selling for. By tapping into the collective knowledge of car shoppers, OpenCarPrice.com provides consumers the same transaction data that previously only dealers are privy to.

Mashable's Take: Remember that feeling of finding out someone got a cheaper plane ticket than you, only hours after you purchased your own? It's a downer. That's why purchase data is important for comparison purposes, and has been applied to a number of predictive technologies that translate into fare-watching services, price shoppers, and more.

OpenCarPrice is one such shopping aid that gives you the purchase history of particular cars so you can get a better estimate on the price you should pay when deciding to buy a new car. The OpenCarPrice site boils down to a niche search engine that shares the history of purchases for specific car models. So if you're in the market to buy a new car, you can see for what prices others have purchased or leased the same car for.

Price also boils down to some other car specifics, like extra features, age, mileage, etc. OpenCarPrice provides the standard data for these other specific points, so you can gain a little more detail when using the site to help you shop prices. It appears that the bulk of the data available through OpenCarPrice is user-generated; you have the option of submitting your own car data to share with others. There are minimal networking features on OpenCarPrice that revolve mostly around submitted car data and commenting.

What's missing are the search filters and comparison tools that enable you to dig further into the data available on OpenCarPrice. It would be nice to see results only from my geographical area, as price points for cars in Virginia don't do me a lot of good. Comparison tools on the site would also simplify navigation so you could see side-by-side views of particular items that are of interest to you. There are bookmarking options for individual results on OpenCarPrice, but this appears to be limited to external bookmarking sites through the AddThis widget.

I wonder if OpenCarPrice will be looking to utilize its collected data for improved search purposes, perhaps even becoming a resource for third-party search engines or classifieds sites that would like to have such information to pass along to their users. Greyboxx and Kaboodle are good examples of how purchase data can be used for search and classifieds services.

Beyond this, there's always the recommendation arena, as we've seen with sites like Farecaster that use purchase data to make predictions and recommendations on good times to buy. OpenCarPrice could use its data towards preferred dealerships, and more.

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